perfectly spherical,
He weareth a runcible hat."

While Lewis Carroll's Wonderland is purely intellectual, Lear
introduces quite another element--the element of the poetical and even
emotional. Carroll works by the pure reason, but this is not so strong
a contrast; for, after all, mankind in the main has always regarded
reason as a bit of a joke. Lear introduces his unmeaning words and his
amorphous creatures not with the pomp of reason, but with the romantic
prelude of rich hues and haunting rhythms.

"Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live,"

is an entirely different type of poetry to that exhibited in
"Jabberwocky." Carroll, with a sense of mathematical neatness, makes
his whole poem a mosaic of new and mysterious words. But Edward Lear,
with more subtle and placid effrontery, is always introducing scraps
of his own elvish dialect into the middle of simple and rational
statements, until we are almost stunned into admitting that we know
what they mean. There is a genial ring of common sense about such
lines as,

"For his aunt Jobiska said 'Every one knows
That a Pobble is better without his toes,'"

which is beyond the reach of Carroll. The poet seems so easy on the
matter that we are almost driven to pretend that we see his meaning,
that we know the peculiar difficulties of a Pobble, that we are as old
travellers in the "Gromboolian Plain" as he is.

Our claim that nonsense is a new literature (we might almost say a new
sense) would be quite indefensible if nonsense were nothing more than
a mere aesthetic fancy. Nothing sublimely artistic has ever arisen out
of mere art, any more than anything essentially reasonable has ever
arisen out of the pure reason. There must always be a rich moral soil
for any great aesthetic growth. The principle of _art for art's sake_
is a very good principle if it means that there is a vital distinction
between the earth and the tree that has its roots in the earth; but it
is a very bad principle if it means that the tree could grow just as
well with its roots in the air. Every great literature has always been
allegorical--allegorical of some view of the whole universe. The
"Iliad" is only great because all life is a battle, the "Odyssey"
because all life is a journey, the Book of Job because all life is a
riddle. There is one attitude in which we think that all existence is
summed up in the word "ghosts"; another, and somewhat bett